Later Never Comes
by Pheonicia
Summary: A life trapped in the vault isn't worth living. Life out in the wasteland isn't worth living without you.
1. Chapter 1

"_I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end."_

My father had two favourite sayings; one he never spoke out loud, and one he repeated endlessly. If the beginning, end, and rest of my life with him were to be summed up in one neat little package, it'd be the second phrase, the repetitive soundtrack of our time together:

"_We'll talk about this later."_

* * *

The beginning of the end—or should I say end of the beginning?—started as the old fairytales do. With a damsel in distress, and a monster needing slaying.

The monster in this case was Butch DeLoria, a little shit who fancied himself the biggest asshole in the vault. He paraded around in a leather jacket he'd filched from some forgotten storage bin, with a snake he must've spent hours embroidering on the back. Called himself and his 'gang'—spineless tag-a-long Paul and brainless meat-head Wally—the _Tunnel Snakes._

Idiots. The only snakes that used to live in the DC area, back when things like snakes still lived, were the harmless kind.

The three of them weren't much more dangerous than toothless snakes, simply a group of punks high on their own bullshit. For the most part we ignored each other—they didn't have much use for a pasty, sullen mouse of a girl, and I never could tolerate fools. If our paths crossed they'd call out lame insults like _vampire_ or _zombie_.

It wasn't intimidating so much as laughable.

On the way to another Overseer-approved Waste Of Time—better known as the GOAT—I caught them harassing Amata. She was...

There aren't words to describe what she was to me. At the time she was my friend, the only person who counted in that closed-off world of recycled air and stifled ideas. The only one who listened, and the only one who cared. It didn't matter if my father spent all his time mentally masturbating in his lab, or if the people surrounding me were either crazy, morons, or a combination of both. Whenever it felt like there was no point to the treadmill existence of life in the vault, Amata was there to make it better.

She gave me more than just friendship – she gave me _hope_.

I found Butch blocking her path, drunk on his own press, leering down at her. "I'll show you a _real_ tunnel snake," he said, hip-thrust and all. His back-up dancers, Wally and Paul, stood nearby and sniggered.

It was the first time I'd ever known true fury. Anger, hurt, annoyance – they all pale to the red-eyed rush of blood and adrenaline that hits, instinct and action suppressing all thought. I ran right at him, slamming into Butch and knocking us both into the hallway wall. Before he could deck me, I latched onto him and _bit_ him in the neck.

Call me a fucking vampire, will you?

It took both of his friends to tear me off. Amata clutched onto my arm, the two of us stunned by what happened. Butch ran off with his buddies, hand clamped on his bleeding neck, swearing and moaning the whole time about diseases, stitches, and _fucking crazy bitches_.

"Thank you." Amata - startled as hell, staring in disgust at the blood trickling down my chin – still had the good grace and presence of mind to thank me.

Told you she was something special.

We wound up in the ladies' room, doing impressions of Butch in mocking girlish voices, laughing with nervous relief as the adrenaline wore off. She helped me wash up, wiping away the stray flecks of blood I couldn't see.

Mr. Brotch wasn't pleased when we finally arrived in the classroom, late to the exam. The dread Tunnel Snakes were already there – Paul and Wally trying in vain to claim ignorance of everything and everyone (not much of a stretch), Butch sunk low in his seat with his jacket collar flipped up high, trying to hide the crisp white bandage on his neck.

I couldn't help it – as soon as he saw me, I _grinned_ at him. The widest, smarmiest, _toothiest_ fucking smile in the history of smiles.

I swear I saw him flinch.

We didn't get lectured for being late, since Amata's dad was the Overseer. Mr. Brotch could hardly start the test without the boss' daughter in the room, could he? I felt like a champion when I walked in with her, everyone staring in wonder. Or fear. Or just plain curiosity.

It didn't matter to me why they looked. I spent the entire test grinning over my swollen ego, sucking on a piece of Butch caught in my back molars. It's not that he tasted very good, but the copper tang of his blood was like nectar to me. It tasted like _victory_.

The test turned out to be a joke. It didn't matter what answers you put down, you'd wind up in whatever job the Overseer already chose for you. Amata, being so sweetly sincere, nibbled on her pencil as she fretted over the page.

Emboldened by my earlier triumph, I put down whatever answer I thought would piss her dad off the most. To say I hated the man would be an understatement – I thought he was a sub-human monster. Where my dad paid no attention to what I did, Amata's father watched her to the point of obsession. She defended him during our whispered discussions of his problems, trying to make excuses for his controlling nature. Like the proverbial whipping dog, she still idolized him despite the way he ruthlessly dominated every aspect of her life.

The only reason he tolerated our friendship was my lack of a penis. She got along fine with the other girls, but I was the one she told her secrets to. I'm the one she shared her dreams with. I'm the one she confided her crushes to. We grew up together, and we were as close as friends could be—no, closer. We were like sisters.

All the good memories I have of the vault were the ones she made. She always looked out for me, more sensitive to slights against me than I ever was. When I didn't get invited to Butch's birthday party—not that I noticed—she actually threw me a surprise party for my birthday to make up for it. Her dad didn't help her at all, and seeing as she was all of fucking ten years old at the time it wasn't much more than party hats and some streamers, but it still stands out as the nicest thing anyone ever did for me.

Little wonder I'd happily bite a thousand jerk-offs like Butch to defend her.

Mr. Brotch took our tests from us, the careless way he handled them confirming what I already guessed—they didn't matter to anyone. Our future jobs—our future _lives_—would be doled out to us in a couple weeks time. Nothing to do but rattle around the slate coloured corridors of the vault until then, following the same monotonous routine of trying to thrive, with no more reason to keep breathing than because you _could_.

After the test Butch hightailed it out of the room, slinking off in a cloud of embarrassment. Amata, on the other hand, positively glowed when we left the classroom. Still riding a giddy high from my 'chivalrous' defense of her honour, and flushed with thoughts of acing the test, she suggested we go _spelunking_ before my dad caught up with me. She'd seen what I hadn't—the perfect corners of Butch's bandage, folded with the meticulous care only my father bothered to waste on gauze.

It didn't matter how many times I told her not to worry about him—my father neither praised nor punished—she always looked out for me like that.

I don't know what it was about her on that day, of all days, but something warm in her smile, something soft in her eyes...it inspired me to new heights of boldness. Still working that piece of Butch out of my teeth, I grabbed her hand, pulled her along after me, and led her off towards the stairwells.

Life in the vault isn't like life on the outside. In the wastes, nobody pays attention to anybody else's business unless they think it'll interfere with their own. But in the vault, everybody's lives _were_ the Overseer's business. We were his fucking puppets, and he watched us dance all day long. Cameras infested the vault, worse than the damn radroaches. Cameras in the halls, cameras in the common rooms, cameras in our quarters, cameras in the damned _bathrooms_—there wasn't anywhere you could go to escape the ever watchful eye of him and his security goons.

Or, more accurately, the places you were _allowed_ to go never let you out of their sight. And it wasn't like they could watch the whole vault at the same time. Only so many monitors, and only one pair of eyes actually looking at them...it didn't take a genius to figure out if you knew the pattern and timing as the cameras flickered on and off screen, you could move through the vault like a ghost.

And I knew them. I'd spent hours sitting in the atrium on an uncomfortable bench, pretending to read a novel for the thousandth time, watching the watchers through the security room glass. Whoever set up the programming all those decades ago was a logical bastard—the images would cycle through the levels, sweeping from one end to the other. The trick to not being seen was to simply stay one step behind the images. It only worked one way though—on the third level you'd have to go east to west, but on the second you'd have to go west to east, or else you'd get caught in the sweep of the lenses.

Amata didn't know how I did it, and I never told her the secret—in case her father got too curious and demanded the knowledge from her—but she loved the game. We called it _spelunking_, pretending we were explorers plumbing forgotten caves for treasure and adventure. Mostly we'd wind up in the off limits areas where the vault architects didn't bother installing watchful eyes, hiding in the depths where the boilers and generators shared space and hissed steam at the ceiling, the grinding of their gears like the screams of the damned. Stanley would bitch about having to go down there to work on the machinery, saying it was like stepping down into hell, but for us it was a private little piece of heaven.

It wasn't perfect though—nothing but metal grate flooring to sit on, the ambient red flashing lights of the machinery enough to make you dizzy if you watched them too long. The danger of getting caught always loomed high on our minds, dread preventing us from fully enjoying the luxury of privacy.

I'd been searching the vault for years—for my entire fucking _life_—always looking for something. A new locale, a new face, and as time wore on I searched endlessly for a way _out_. The others thought I was a little off—I heard them when they whispered behind my back, calling me obsessive like my father, among other less generous things. It only spurred me to look harder. They were the crazy ones, not me—how could they not want to know what lay outside the metal blast walls and layers of rock?

The obsession paid off in the sixteenth year of what passed for living in that monotonous hell hole. I'd checked every wall, scrutinized every ceiling, and finally worked my way down to the floors. In a little used generator room, where the back up units slumbered and the broken pieces came to die, one of the metal squares of grating lifted up to reveal the greatest thing I'd ever known.

True privacy.

Back when they built the vault they must've used the squat tunnel as a sort of crawl space, or maybe they left it for pipes and cabling that never got installed. It didn't matter why it was there—just that it existed, and it led to an even more magical spot—my secret world.

A natural cavern, barely tall enough for me to stand hunched over, just long enough to stretch out on the bumpy floor. Everything I could think of got squirreled away in there to make it better—a dim lantern hung from the ceiling, the vodka I stole from Butch's drunk of a mother, and a mattress that damned near killed me to get in there. Pushing it though the crawl space I wound up wrapped in it, stuck so tight I thought I'd die of starvation before I could get free. It got pissed on in fear, but somehow I scrambled out of it, later managing to get it all the way through to the cavern.

Despite using every type of cleansing product on it, I never could get the smell entirely out. Not that it mattered—when I was in my little cave, air growing thick with carbon monoxide and scented with stale urine, I was the fucking Queen of the vault.

Because I found a way _outside_.

It was my escape, my fortress, my only defense against the grinding dullness of daily life. I never breathed a word of it to anyone, not even Amata, for fear it would be discovered. If the Overseer knew he would seal it off, and the thought of losing the only thing I really considered mine _terrified_ me. I couldn't risk it—and I didn't, not until that fateful day, when Amata looked at me like I really was the Queen of the fucking vault, and I found I _liked_ it.

Proud and cocksure—strutting like I had a real pair wagging between my legs—I led her down to the maintenance room and swore her to absolute secrecy. When she promised not to breathe a word, not even to her father, I tore the square of grating up so fast it clipped the edge of my forehead.

The whole situation blew her mind. She laughed, she gasped, she tried to soothe me as I clutched my throbbing head and swore—she came _alive_. Fully alive, nothing like the robotic drone her father wanted her—and the rest of us—to be. She was so goddamn beautiful in that moment, so sweet and happy and kind and innocent. She was everything a person should be—everything I wanted to be, but knew I never could.

Reaching the cavern set her off again, minutes passing before she finally stopped running her hands over the walls and finally settled down on the mattress. It might have been a lack of oxygen in the small space, the both of us sucking back air and sneaking sips of booze as we mimicked Butch's retreat over and over again, but we laughed until we were light-headed.

"Want to see my tunnel snake?" Amata joked, kneeling on the mattress and thrusting her hips at my head.

"More like tunnel _worm_." The face she made set me off again—she was always too fun to tease. "And didn't you want to see it? I thought you had a crush on Butchie Baby."

"Don't be gross," she scolded, flopping down beside me, "I haven't liked him since I was nine." She sighed, a whistle of noise I knew meant she was thinking about something difficult—often something her father didn't want her questioning. "Do you ever think about the future? We're all supposed to marry, for the good of the vault and the continuation of humanity...well, who would _you_ marry?"

"I won't be here." She didn't believe me, smacking me in the arm with admonishments to be serious. I meant every word. "I'm getting out of this place. There's no way—no goddamn way—your father will ever make me fuck somebody like Wally Mack just so he can watch."

Amata gasped, warning me not to talk like that. She always pretended to be shocked by it, but she loved it. I could say the things she didn't dare _think_ for fear of her father finding out. She'd say I was too brave, but she never noticed it was only around her, and only in private.

As if I could ever say that to the Overseer and not be doomed to a lifetime's work in the waste disposal section, shovelling shit for the rest of my days.

"What about you? Who do you want to screw on camera?" Stealing the bottle from her before she could hit me with it, my teasing didn't abate for a second. "Why don't we learn how to do that in class? _How To Kiss 101_—_mandatory attendance for all by order of God, oops, I mean me, the Overseer. _We'd put on a better show for him if they taught us something like that."

Amata ignored the comments, pretending she couldn't hear anything other than herself. "I bet Butch would be a terrible kisser."

"He doesn't taste very good, if that's what you want to know." Finally picking out the remaining bit of flesh with a fingernail, I flicked the little piece of Butch at the rocky wall. Amata shrieked when it hit, then shrieked again when it fell off and landed on the end of the mattress. She scrambled to kick it off, giggling so hard she couldn't aim properly. "Of course—going back to our improv pornography discussion—it'd be tricky when it came time for the practical lessons. There's no way your father would let you kiss any boy, least not any with his balls still attached. So...I guess we'd have to pair up girl-girl and boy-boy. Who do you think Butch would choose—Wet Wally, or Paul Hardon?"

"You're sick." Amata lay on her side, slapping the mattress as she laughed, tears welling up in the corners of her large eyes.

"Don't worry, I'd be your partner. Wouldn't want you catching anything from Christine, and Susie'd probably bite your tongue off." I capped off the vodka, setting it to the side. Amata didn't suspect a thing until I jumped her, rolling her onto her back and pinning her down. She turned her slapping hands on me, giggling her ass off as she tried to push me away.

"Am I supposed to say something seductive first? Oh, Amata, you make my blood run hotta. That do anything for you, sugarmuffin?"

"Eew!" Amata's defenses crumpled as a renewed burst of laughter rocked her body. It was like trying to hold onto an electrified radroach, the way she kept jerking under my hands.

"Don't worry, my sweet little Amatacakes. It's only practice. It's not like it's a _real_ kiss."

"You wouldn't dare—" As soon as the words left her lips she went stiff, realizing she said exactly the wrong thing. Those words, whenever _she_ voiced them when alone with me, were like a horde of raiders hollering through my reason, hacking it to shreds with my desire to prove her wrong.

"Just practice," I whispered, suddenly too goddamn aware of the space between my legs and the stifling heat of our little cavern. Before she could protest and I could lose my nerve, I kissed her—boldly, wetly, and altogether sloppily.

As far as first kisses go, it was an explosively hot, horrible fucking failure.

She tried to buck me off, her knee slamming hard into my inner thigh. Falling to the side with a yelp, I rolled onto her arm, accidentally spraining her wrist. We both moaned and cursed each other out until the pain wore off and the alcohol kicked in. Finally, after the bickering stopped, we managed to drag our sorry asses back to the stale confines of the vault, both suffering from our little misadventure into the outside world.

She didn't speak to me until I got her back to her quarters, along with a few stolen drugs for her wrist, filched from the stock my father kept in our rooms. Standing in the Overseer's suite—just like everybody else's boring rooms, only with a larger floor plan—Amata surprised the hell out of _me_ for a change.

"Can we go spelunking again tomorrow?" she asked, before her cheeks suddenly turned the colour of tomato sauce. "No—not for more practice! Not that it was horrible, but it wasn't...I mean, I wasn't..." She squirmed, body wriggling to and fro, the glare of the lights making her blush look twice as bright. "Well, I mean, we could both use some practice, I'm sure, but we don't have to—"

"But if you wanted to..." I only managed those few words before heart-thudding anxiety slammed my throat shut. Maybe she didn't want to, but I sure as hell did.

"You should go, before your father finishes work." She urged me to the door, movements and voice jittery with nerves. Just before I stepped into the hall she blurted out the words that changed our lives forever. "Well, it is just practice, right?"

"Right." I nodded to her as the metal doors slid shut behind me. She had the largest, sweetest, most relieved grin on her face, and in that moment I was hit with a revelation the size of an atom bomb.

I was in love with the Overseer's daughter.

Or in other words—I was _fucked_.


	2. Chapter 2

The next three years were the most beautiful goddamned torture anyone could go through.

I loved Amata—loved her in every way I could, every chance I could get. But I never told her, especially not when she'd start with those damn whistling sighs, talking about how it's _just practice, right?_ I could never be to her what she was to me, and it turned my gut into acid every time she asked that fucking question.

It didn't stop me, though. Nothing could drive me from her, not even when she started to get funny on me, laying beside me on the mattress in our cramped little world that reeked of sex and booze and freedom, dragging the baggage from the vault into our sanctuary in the form of her father's hang ups.

"Maybe we should stop practicing," she suggested, all sweetness and light beside me as she sliced my heart out with a scalpel. "I don't really want to, but the guys aren't doing this...maybe, if we stop, then we'll like it better with them when we finally do it for real?"

She worried about it, and the more I tried to soothe her the more she pulled away. What other choice did I have? If she was scared this was turning into something more, something _real_, I had to prove to her it wasn't.

So I started screwing one of the security guards.

Officer Gomez. His first name was Herman, but I never called him that. Husband to Pepper, father to Freddie, he was the best choice available in the small pool of the vault. He knew the ins and outs of the cameras, knew where and when we could do it without being caught, and had a family to think about. There'd be no bragging, no rumours, no love notes or strings, and there sure as hell'd be no discussion of marriage and babies. Just furtive hidden moments in dark corners.

He barely put up a fight. He'd always looked a little longer, smiled a little brighter, stood a little closer. I managed to seduce him with the all the grace and charm of a mole rat, batting my eyes and shaking my pitiful tits at him until he finally took me on the armoury floor. It wasn't very comfortable, metal grating leaving hash marks all over my ass, and it didn't last very long before he finished, guilt and pleasure making his hands shake as he did up his uniform, but I didn't really mind.

I'd do anything for Amata.

The gamble worked. She looked at me like I was the boldest, bravest person in the world when I told her. I loved it when she did that—it made me feel important, necessary, wanted. In her eyes I mattered, and it sufficed for both of us.

She was the only thing in the vault that mattered to me. My life, as the Overseer willed it, would be following in my father's footsteps as the vault's doctor. I hated the idea, hated the studies, hated every moment I wasted on medicine. I didn't care and I didn't want to—my test results were pathetic, my attitude worse, and only the very real fear of being reassigned to shit shovelling duty kept me from completely failing.

Every morning I woke up sick to my stomach, so full of bile I'd cough up acid if I tried to drink anything. I'd spend the day staring at the green text of the console, trying to study something I loathed, barely able to concentrate and so goddamned angry at being forced to do this I wanted to scream. Then it would be supper alone, my father working late in the lab. If I was lucky, Officer Gomez would offer to take me for _target practice_. A stray shot broke the camera in the shooting range years ago, and he carried the only set of keys. Occasionally I'd even get a chance to squeeze off a few rounds between him squeezing off his own.

If I was really lucky Amata would come by, able to break free from her studies—being trained to work beside her father, surprise fucking surprise. We'd escape to our own little world where the Overseer couldn't touch us, where I could know what it was to be _happy_. It was never enough to make it all better, and each return to the vault ground my heart down one turn of the wheel more.

Sleep became a distant stranger, the nights passed in staring at the ceiling, wondering who was watching me on the cameras. Paranoia sprang up like a fungus planted in the fetid, dark shit of my life. So many secrets to juggle—Amata, Officer Gomez, my cozy cavern—they stacked on top of each other until my mind started to crack. I saw shadows in the corner of my eyes, felt the lenses of the cameras on me, like grubby hands tickling my neck, and barely ate enough to keep a child alive.

On the nights when nobody came by, I'd sneak out of my quarters and move through the vault like a shadow, watching the watchers. Conspiracies were everywhere, and I would root them out. I'd hide in lockers and watch the maintenance men put the passwords into the terminals, then log in when they left and read all the files. I'd spend hours kneeling beside a closet door, trying to pick the lock open, convinced I'd find a team assigned to track my every move rather than a broken vacuum and dust covered shelves.

I hacked everything with a screen, opened everything with a lock. Near the end I started working on devices to help me catch them. I could hear them whispering to each other as I lay in bed, tiny voices in the corners of my room, but never loud enough to make out their dark plots. I hid recorders in the furniture, then woke up the next morning to find nothing—which only proved to me they'd come when I finally fell asleep and replaced the evidence with blank tapes.

So I tried not to sleep, and I made my own recorders, complete with traps if anyone tried to tamper with them.

My behaviour didn't go unnoticed, but in the spectrum of insanity that was daily life in the vault I barely registered. Sure, I looked like a cadaver, eyes perpetually black with exhaustion, bones poking through everywhere, skin ghostly pale from shunning the sun lamps in favour of vitamin supplements—I was convinced the lights were programmed with coded messages, able to infiltrate your mind if you looked at them.

But I still danced like a good little puppet to the Overseer's tune, so why fix what isn't broken?

Snapping became my way of life. My mind snapped when I tried to think, my joints snapped when I walked, I snapped at everyone who had the misfortune of talking to me. I even snapped at Amata, driving her from our cavern one bleak evening with my crazy suspicions. I spent the rest of the night curled in a ball on our mattress, formulating a way to end it all with my BB gun.

Of all the problems I had, both real and imagined, it was the one I worried least about that blew up in my face. Officer Gomez, showing a depth of feeling I hadn't considered, wound up drunk, morose, and in a confessing sort of mood. Just my luck—my father happened to take that night off to join him as his drinking buddy.

He found me in my room, soldering one of my half-functioning recorders completely shut. "Seleste," he announced as he strode in, "I think it's finally time we had a talk."

"Susie Mack started it. She stole my bear." In my mind this made perfect sense—the first memory I had of my father was him telling me we'd discuss the incident of my hitting Susie _later_. I was only four at the time, but I'd been waiting for that discussion ever since.

"What? No. Sweetie, come here." He sat on my bed, patting the mattress for me to join him. I did as he asked, but I hated it—we sat with our backs to the window, and though I'd covered it in a jigsaw of scrap metal, camouflaged with cloth salvaged from old jumpsuits to throw _them_ off the scent, it made my neck prickle to know _they_ could be behind me right now, somehow watching us both through layers of hammered steel and worn denim.

He spoke, saying a lot without really saying anything at all. His words deflected off my brittle cocoon of madness, bouncing into the dark corners where _they_ liked to whisper. I spent the whole time wondering what they'd do with them, what odd weapons they'd build out of my father's sentences, and how they'd then twist them against me.

I don't recall much of what he said. Mostly the general platitudes he always threw at me, the lines that kept my bothersome troubles and worries at bay, leaving him free to think about more interesting things. My mother loved me very much, I was a good person inside, how proud he was of me—proud for screwing one of his best friends? No, proud of my studies, the ones I couldn't bear to think about without feeling my stomach clench in a spasm of acid-laced pain.

What could he do to help me? I wanted his fucking attention for a change. I wanted him to feel something for me, even if it was anger or disgust. Anything other than these absent pats on the head and empty praise. I'd take yelling, screaming, cursing—hell, I'd be happy if he hit me, because it'd mean he cared enough to belt me one for being so stupid.

He asked, and I answered.

The rubber bands holding me together finally snapped one time too many. I jumped off the bed, pressed my back against the wall, and started _screaming_. Spittle flew from my mouth as I railed against the Overseer, my studies, the confines of the vault, before my mind completely jumped track and I started shouting about _them_.

My father tried to get me to calm down, to sit on the bed and be quiet, but I slapped his hands away in a frenzy. I shook, vibrating like a machine with a broken cog, screaming nonsense at him until a pinprick in my arm stole my legs from under me.

A small shot of med-x, just enough to tranquilize me. In a cotton soft haze he maneuvered me onto the bed. I heard my father promising me he'd talk to the Overseer and see what he could do about my work assignment. Then I caught the faint click of the intercom, his assistant Jonas calling for him, exclaiming something about signs of success in the latest batch.

Before I dipped completely under, my father left me with one final promise. "We'll talk more about this later..."

When I woke up the next morning, nothing had really changed. My father wasn't home, already at work in his lab. The console with its green textual torture awaited my attention. Only Officer Gomez acted different—he'd leave a room as soon as I entered.

One other thing had changed, a very tiny little thing, but one that made a giant impact on my life. I learned through my father's action there _was_ something I could do to make the pain go away, if only for a little while.

_Drugs_.


	3. Chapter 3

Everyone living in the vault suffered from the claustrophobic oppression of daily life, all of them infected with some form of insanity. Surprisingly enough, I wasn't the one who broke first.

My _father_ did.

He'd been running his experiments for years on the sly, doing who the hell knows what for hours on end. The man shared nothing with me, choosing to confide it all in his lab assistant Jonas. Perhaps I should be grateful—thanks to my dad, Jonas wound up shot through the head when it all went sour.

I slept through it, nightly ritual of med-x chasing away the demon thoughts hounding my every waking moment, allowing me to lose myself to dreamless sleep. I wasn't an addict, oh, hell no. According to the ever-knowing green text on my console, a person was clinically addicted if they used 1cc or more on a daily basis.

I only used 0.9, so I was just _fine_.

Amata managed to do what the alarms and flashing lights could not, rousing me from my drugged out slumber. She shook with fear and carried a pistol—I opened my eyes to see my secret lover waving a fucking _gun_ around my head.

"Your father got _out_!"

_Out_? I had no idea what the hell she was yelling about. There was no _out_ to go to—had he gone out of his mind? Come out of the closet? Nothing made sense in the numbing fog of med-x.

Slowly she got through to me, invigorating bursts of icy fear and rage shooting adrenaline into my system, driving the soft blur of the drug away. He'd gotten out—out of the vault, out into the wasteland beyond, out of my life.

And he left me behind, to suffer for his mistakes. With the confusion, the alarms, and the blood on the floor, the crazy residents of Vault 101 went right out of their minds. The Overseer wanted to see me—Amata didn't say why, but judging by the gun in her hand and the things she couldn't bring herself to tell me, I figured he wanted to kill me in my father's stead.

The gun wound up passed between us, until I finally forced her to keep it. I had my BB rifle and a baseball bat—what the fuck I thought I could do with them, only the med-x knows—and with the main lights out, the radroaches swarming out of the pipes, and the residents going off their nut, I figured she needed it more than I did. She ran off with promises to meet me in her quarters—it wouldn't be safe for us to travel together, in case the guards caught us both.

Med-x, thinking, and memory do not play well together. Only snatches of the trip through the vault come to mind, distorted sounds and blurry shapes—red lights flashing off the metal walls, Butch DeLoria screaming like a girl down the hall, the clatter of a thousand radroach feet crawling through the rooms, and me sneaking through it all, armed to the teeth with an idiot's choice in weaponry.

Luck, always the fickle bitch, decided to cut me a break for once. A large hand seized the scruff of my jumpsuit as I slithered up the stairs. Before I could scream the other hand clamped over my mouth.

"I know you can keep your mouth shut," Officer Gomez growled in my ear. He was furious, frustrated, and worst of all, scared—none of which had anything to do with me. That terrified me the most, seeing this man, someone who I'd thought to be the stronger of the both of us, quaking in his boots over the shit falling down around our heads.

We moved through the rest of the vault, hiding in plain sight; him the successful security officer, me the meek prisoner. Nobody stopped us and nobody questioned him. Gunshots echoed through the atrium, shouts turned into curdled screams of pain, all of it accented with the pulsing red glow of the emergency lights.

"I always liked you, kid." Officer Gomez unhanded me at the hallway leading to the Overseer's suite, where Amata waited with a plan to get me to safety. "Now get the fuck out of here, and don't ever come back."

I moved down that hallway crouched over, bent double to stay hidden out of sight from the damn windows littering the corridor. A thousand times I'd walked its floor with Amata at my side, and now I slunk across it like a guilty thief, utterly alone.

Almost at the end, a girlish shout of defiance knocked my heart to my throat. Amata, _my_ Amata, cried out that she'd _never tell_.

I popped right up like an idiot, ready to take any number of bullets to the head in order to see her. She sat in a chair on the other side of a fish-bowl window, red-faced and crying, her father and one of the security men looming over her. With the coldest, most heartless fucking expression on his face, the Overseer nodded at the guard.

He swung his hand, cracking Amata in the side of the head.

Everything got _really_ loud—I screamed, she screamed, a gun went off—it turned into a goddamn madhouse. Not thinking straight—not thinking at all—I beat myself against the locked door, yelling to her and trying to break down the metal through force of will.

It slid open, Amata racing out, clutching the gun to her chest, as I stumbled in. The officer lay dead on the floor, blood trickling out in the lazy flow of a silenced heart. The Overseer, face white with bloodless rage, moved to go after his daughter.

I jumped him. Despite the massive size difference—me a scrawny, strung-out girl, him a giant fucking asshole—what I lacked in strength I made up for in sheer insanity. Trying to get me off was like trying to get the stink off shit.

"You'll get nothing from me," he shouted, so goddamn sure of himself, "I'll die before I see the safety of the Vault compromised again!"

We went down in a tumble of off-kilter balance and unbalanced sanity. His back crushed me against the floor, while my limbs held him in a vice grip.

"Let her go, or so help me I'll fucking _kill_ her!" I snarled the words in his ear, scaring myself with how much I meant them. Better for Amata to die—for all of us to die—than suffer his soul-crushing oppression a moment longer.

"My God, you're a cold blooded little shit, aren't you? I think you'd actually do it." The fight went out of him as he surrendered. He lay stiffly on the ground, allowing me to scramble up, training my goddamn BB gun at his eye—what the fuck else could I hope to injure with that thing? "You should run like your coward of a father."

He didn't have to tell me twice. I found Amata in the living room, perched on the edge of the couch, clutching herself and shivering as she stared at the pistol on the coffee table. I dragged her along but left the gun, thinking it would help if she didn't have to see it while I tried to talk her out of her shock. I didn't have anything to give her, too stupid with med-x to think of picking up any supplies from my father's stash. The only thing I had to medicate her with was the damned baseball bat.

Halfway through the Overseer's escape tunnel, I strongly considered it. Just a little tap, enough to distract her, maybe get the adrenaline flowing...

She came back to herself once we reached the vault entrance, but she didn't stop shaking. My arms never left her as she punched in the code, grasping onto her shuddering frame, feeling her heartbeat racing too damn fast through the fabric of her jumpsuit.

Sirens went off, so loud they rattled the floor, making us both scream in terror. Warning bells whooped as the giant mechanical arm creaked into motion, wheeling the massive metal door—cog-shaped and several feet thick—out of position.

"It's open. It's finally _open_! Amata, come on, we have to—"

"No."

That _no_ hit me like a slap to the face. Everything we'd dreamed of in our secret cavern—getting out, getting _free_—lay right within our grasp. "What the fuck do you mean _no?!_"

She meant _no_. Didn't matter how much I argued, pleaded, cried, or begged. She wouldn't budge, just standing there clutching onto the metal railing by the door controls, shaking her head and shivering. "My father needs me—"

"FUCK YOUR FATHER!" I couldn't accept it, couldn't handle the idea she would choose _him_ over _me_. She held onto the railing with all her might, and no amount of struggling with her could make her let go.

"I can't go without you," I sobbed into her shoulder.

"You can't stay." Already the heavy sound of armoured boots could be heard past the shriek of the sirens. "Go," Amata urged, finally letting go of the railing to shove me towards the door. "Go!"

I stumbled, blinded by tears, scared shitless at the thought of losing her.

"Go, _for me_," she broke down as she begged me to leave, sobs supplanting any further words. We cried at each other, for each other, for all the wasted opportunities and plans that would never be.

The security guards broke up our departure, kicking open the door, waving their guns around and shouting. Amata screamed, jumping in front of them with her arms spread wide, blocking them from a clear shot at me.

I had no choice. I ran. Half-blind with tears, body shaking with too many emotions to name, I managed to scramble over the notched door frame. One of the guards got to the controls, setting off a round of sirens as the door moved back into place. Another guard squeezed a couple of shots off at me, one striking the rock wall so close a chip flew off and bloodied my cheek.

"Amata!" I dropped down to my hands and knees, trying to see her through the quickly narrowing sliver of space as the door rolled shut. "I'll come back for you! I promise!"

I couldn't tell if she heard me—she lay on the floor at the feet of a guard, either passed out or knocked down.

"I love you!" I screamed to her right before the vault door clicked into place. Just like that I was suddenly cut off from everything I'd ever known, and the only thing that mattered in my life, with nothing more than the jumpsuit on my back, two useless weapons, and a handful of clean-picked skeletons to comfort me.

For all the pain and hurt I'd ever known, nothing could have prepared me for what hit me then.

And the best—worst?—part of it, is I had my _father_ to thank for it all.


	4. Chapter 4

Addiction is a miserable fucking companion, but once in a while it's _almost_ worth having around.

If my body didn't need the next dose of med-x, I'd have spent my last days curled up at the vault door, out of my mind with fear and pain, clawing pathetically at the impassive steel while endlessly screaming Amata's name.

But I was hooked on the goddamned stuff, regardless of what the green medical texts told me. After hours—seconds, years, it hurt so much I couldn't tell the difference—the shakes started to set in, and my skin crawled.

Literally. I could watch goosebumps ripple up and down my fucking arms.

_Maybe_, the addiction whispered to me, _if I take just a quick walk to see what's at the other end of the tunnel, I can find a little something to tide me over. Just until Amata gets the door open again_...

I remember the first step away from the vault—it hurt so bad, a mass of guilt and loss and pain. I felt like I was losing her all over again, like I was giving up on her. The next thing I remember is waking up huddled against a rock in the middle of the wastes, covered in the sick sweat of withdrawal, shaking so hard my muscles cramped, all the while being watched by a strange man wearing goggles on his forehead, his two-headed cow, and his heavily armed companion.

"Told you she wasn't dead." Crazy Wolfgang, wasteland trader and my personal saviour, somehow managed to get me to the closest town, despite my inability to think, walk, or even stay in touch with reality. The trek there was a nightmare of a bad trip—the parched barren earth became a molten sea, the listing concrete overpasses leading to lost highways turned into giant tidal waves ready to crash over me, and the sun somehow directed it all as it roasted me alive.

Lucidity only came back to me when I woke up in Megaton, laying in a rusty metal shack owned by a crusty excuse of a doctor. He greeted me with the bill for getting me clean—a hundred caps for running an IV into my veins and dripping in a handful of chemicals! Oh, but don't worry about having absolutely nothing of any value to pay it with, after all, what's a little indentured slavery between friends?

The worst part is I didn't _want_ to be clean. My body might not've needed the med-x, but my mind and heart _burned_ for them. The pain never left, a sickening wave of guilt rolling through my veins as I scrubbed out bedpans, or sadness shattering my heart while I washed bloody sheets.

The gig with Doc Church barely lasted a week before he threw me out into the streets, falsely accusing me of stealing jet from his supplies. Suddenly I was faced with the problem of having no money, no source of food, no place to sleep, and no med-x to make my worries go away. In the ironic quirk of fate that bitch Luck loves throwing my way, I wound up crossing paths with the very person who got me kicked out of Doc's in the first place.

Leo Stahl, Megaton's dealer and number one addict all rolled into one. He taught me everything there is about addiction—how to lie, how to steal, how to sell, and how much a miserable junkie loves company, because when it's somebody else nodding out in the corner in a puddle of their own piss, you can look at 'em and thank Christ you aren't _that_ fucked up.

I took any work I could find, even shovelling brahmin shit with enthusiasm if it got me that bit closer to my precious med-x. There wasn't anywhere to sleep in that damn town, everyone rich enough or old enough claiming the scrapheaps that passed as houses, those of us left to battle for space in the common rooms only as lucky as our numbers allowed. Being as there was only one of me, I never won that fight.

Finally, after being rousted from the back of every building in town, I got a little place to call my own. A broken stall in the woman's bathrooms, the toilet blown up or kicked out until only a stump of pedestal remained stuck in the floor. I stole a lock off a door, stole a door off a building, and managed to secure myself a space to nod off in during the day.

For some reason, nobody else wanted to fight me for the right to sleep on the shithouse floor.

I still don't know how long I lived like that in Megaton, chasing oblivion in my dark hole during the day, coming out when the sun went down to try earning, stealing, or begging enough caps to do it all over again. I feared the sun, my intolerant skin so badly burnt during my arrival I shed palm sized pieces for a week.

Most of the residents didn't look twice at me, just another strung out wastelander littering their town, my vault suit long ago sold for caps. Only one bothered with me for longer than it took to brush me away—Jericho, retired raider and functioning alcoholic.

One overly bright afternoon found me without enough med-x in my pocket, Leo's supply running frighteningly low. I needed something else to get me through the day. I wound up slamming back vodka in Moriarty's scuzzy tavern, my ravenous thirst attracting Jericho's notice. I got drunk off my skull, he got me back to his place, and I spent the entire time casing the place with my eyes while he got off.

Instead of a mattress to crash on and a few sticky-fingered momentos to swipe as I left, he shoved me out the door right after he finished. "Goddamn _junkie_. Don't even _think_ about it."

I cursed him out through the rust-eaten walls of his shack, half-dressed and fully drunk, before shambling off to my stall to forget about his disrespect, along with everything else that made up the rest of my miserable excuse for a life.

What finally got me off the downward spiral of drug addiction? More drugs. _Psycho_, to be specific. I'd never tried it, and knew nothing about it. The say the army created it, and the vault architects didn't see fit to include the formula in their medical database.

No wonder—the stuff was like a missile of bliss rocketing right through your nervous system to detonate in your brain. It made everything feel so good it hurt, and turned pain into fucking nirvana. One hit and I was hooked. Med-x addiction was something I _wanted_; psycho was something I _needed—_completely, absolutely, and above all—_right now_.

I burned through my pitiful stash of caps in one night, winding up broke and desperate for more come morning. Chasing my high, I went to the first place I could think of with enough untraceable junk to hawk to make it worth my while—Jericho's. While he drank his breakfast at Moriarty's I broke into his shack and robbed him blind, so goddamned proud of myself for my _clever_ revenge.

Even a child could follow the trail I left behind, selling all of his shit in one go, jittering from one foot to the other, my legs exploding in sparks while the psycho wore off. I ran to Leo, handing him everything I had just for another hit...then another, and another. Even when Jericho burst in on us— hiding in the back of the water treatment plan, shooting ourselves full of chems—I didn't care about anything more than the next hit.

It turned out to be a left hook to the face, Jericho hauling me to my feet just to knock me right back down. I was so out of my mind with psycho I simply lay there and laughed, finding it hysterical when he called me a_ fucking junkie bitch_ before storming off.

Come morning, I couldn't find anything remotely funny about my life. Huddled in my filthy stall, pressing my bruised face against the cool stump of the toilet in an attempt to get the swelling down, I realized just how far I'd fallen, and how much lower I was willing to go in the name of _psycho_.

In a rare moment of lucidity I saw the full power of the drug, and it _terrified_ me.

Nobody could handle that kind of euphoria, especially not a wasted addict who barely knew what regular happiness felt like. Just like that, I decided to get free. I figured it'd be real _simple_ this time around—after all, I finally wanted to kick the habit, right?

I became the largest headache in that shithole of a town, huddled in my little 'home,' moaning and screaming and crying all hours of the day and night. The women wanted to get me out so they could take a piss in peace, resorting to yelling when sweet talking didn't work. I told them all to fuck off whenever the tremors stopped long enough to ungrit my teeth.

They summoned Doc Church, wanting him to fix me with another needle and a different drug. No way would I owe anything to him again. As soon as his hand snaked under the stall wall, I stabbed it with a shard of broken porcelain and threatened to cut his balls off if he came near me again.

"I can't fix crazy," he snarled to the interfering bitches as he rushed off. Nobody bothered trying to help me after that; they'd either hurl insults at me, punch the walls I hid behind as a lame threat, or treated me with no more regard than a stray turd in the corner. Kind of appropriate—I felt worse than shit and smelled twice as bad.

The turning point came when a pair of heavy boots reeking of stale cigarette smoke stomped up to my stall. He didn't say anything, just kicked a little gift over to me and walked right back out.

A syringe. Filled with med-x, laying right there by my knee, positively begging for me to pick it up.

It must've been an hour I stared at it, huddled in a ball as far away as I could get, beating my fists into my legs as temptation and paranoia battled for control.

_Maybe I could wean off it? Only have a little, just enough to shrink my addiction to half its size...that'd make it easier to quit, right?_

_But what if it's a trap? Why would Jericho give it to me, if not revenge? What could he be planning that he'd want me strung out and docile? Was it just to get me to quit moaning and shut up? Was it kindness? Was it a sick joke to him?_

Anger carried me most of the way from my temptation, but hope swooped in at the end, saving me from faltering at the last moment. Half-clean for the first time in ages, I finally dared to think of Amata. She'd sent me out of the vault _for her_, and what had I done with my life? What kind of reward would it be, to find me a pathetic excuse of an addict, with piss-stains on my clothes and track marks up and down my arms? Was that the kind of life I wanted to welcome her to?

"Fuck, _no_." Snatching the syringe up with twitching fingers, I staggered out into town. People actually walked the other way when they saw me coming, holding that fucking needle like a dagger, covered in all sorts of stains and sickness, face twisted in a psychotic snarl. I dragged my broken ass all the way to the trader, slammed the med-x on the counter, and _sold_ it.

I might not be able to do it for myself, but I could do _anything_ for her.

In what seemed like a really good plan at the time, I took that handful of caps to the saloon, trading them all in for a bottle of vodka. The room in the back quickly became my private area, everyone clearing out rather than tolerate the reek of me. I sat in the darkest corner, pouring myself sloppy shots, trying not to groan too loudly and risk getting kicked out.

"You're really fucking serious about this." Jericho plopped himself down across from me, took the bottle from my trembling hands, and poured the vodka into my glass rather than all over the table. "Relax, kid. I'm here to drink and stink, just like you."

We didn't bother talking, because there wasn't anything to say. I drank until I couldn't feel the alcohol anymore, then he dragged me to the puddle of water surrounding the bomb in the middle of town, made fun of that crazy Confessor Cromwell with a joke about baptizing me in the glow, and proceeded to swish me around in it until I was cleaner than the scuzzy water. Afterwards he took me back to his place and screwed himself to sleep.

That night I slept on a real bed for the first time in a very long time. When I woke up, I found him sitting on a chair, smoking a cigarette and watching me. "What're you thinking about, kid?"

"Abso-fucking-lutely _nothing_."

"Hell, yeah." He handed me his cigarette, rested his shit-kicking boots on the table, and lit himself another smoke.

_Just like that_, I was off the drugs, had a place to stay, and even managed to make a new friend. Things were finally looking up for a change.

Real fucking _simple_, huh?


	5. Chapter 5

I asked Jericho why he did it, after I finally realized there was more in it for him than a warm hole to screw and an arm to lean on when we staggered back from a night of drinking. He made sure I ate—I'd gotten so bad I actually forgot I was supposed to do it every day, let alone more than just once; sedated me with vodka and sex at the first scratch of my pockmarked arms; even followed me when I started my weekly pilgrimages to the vault bearing my offerings of charcoal and blank pieces of paper.

He thought I didn't know, but I could hear the crunch of his boots as I slithered through the shadows under the moon, intent on leaving another sign for Amata in view of the vault door camera. I'm sure her father's ass clenched so hard when he saw me in the monitors he could shit diamonds, but it made me feel better to do it, even if it was as futile as shouting into the wind. Somehow, in some odd way, I thought she could hear me as I scratched her name onto my cobbled together posters, letting her know I hadn't forgotten.

One such night, on my way home from another silent vigil, I took advantage of the lack of moon to double back in the darkness. Jericho didn't hear me until I clicked the safety off the pistol I'd swiped from his shack, levelling it at his head. "Why me?"

I still remember his answer. _Cause you're smart enough to think of ideas, stupid enough to think they're good ones, and fool crazy enough to carry 'em out._

Turns out there isn't piss all to do in Megaton when you're clean, other than drink and screw, and there's only so much of one you can do before it interferes with the other. Life turned into another crushing grindstone of routine—work, drink, sleep, then get up and do it all over again. Only thing of any interest in that place was the man I shacked up with.

Jericho. He was a goddamn rat bastard son of a bitch, and he made no apologies for it. He used to run with some raiders, doing all kinds of crazy shit up and down the wastes. When I found him he'd retired from that life, growing puffy with drink and numb with boredom.

He didn't know what to do with himself, and I couldn't stop thinking of what to do next. My brain, so long neglected and wrecked in a wash of chems and starvation, began to flex again. Amata never left my thoughts, every spare moment leading me to think of her out of the vaults, out here with me.

Each time I did that, I felt like shit. No way would I share her with Jericho—if he so much as turned his bloodshot eyes on her, I'd scoop 'em out with a spoon.

Which left me desperate to make it big, somehow get enough caps for my own place (_our_ place, as I always thought of it) with more than enough left over so neither of us ever had to worry about work. I wanted to surround her with luxury and finery—only the best for my Amata.

There was no way in hell I could make that happen in Megaton, working for pittance and scraps. Desperate for suggestions, one hungover morning I finally asked Jericho how to make a killing in the wasteland.

He looked me over, stole the cigarette from my lips, and took a long drag. "With this," he answered in a haze of smoke, passing me a gun.

No more constraints of routine, left to the mercy of others to tell you where to dance, how long to do it, and what you'll get for being a good little cog in the machine. With a weapon in hand, and the untold bounty of the wastes beckoning to us, there was no turning back.

That is, once we solved the initial problem of finding a weapon I couldn't fuck up. No way could I go toe to toe with so much as a rabid dog—pouring all those calories down my throat each night hid some of my pointiest bones from view, but it didn't add any muscle. I was shit with pistols, worse with shotguns, and so bad with assault rifles Jericho tackled me to the ground rather than let me practice. He didn't want to risk losing his balls to a stray shot.

It didn't help I was a goddamned coward at first, popping off so many shots before the target was in range, I'd have to change out the clip just when it counted. Whenever Jericho convinced me to hold off and try aiming for a change, I'd hesitate so damn long there was a chance I'd shoot my foot off when I finally hit my mark.

He eventually sobered up long enough to choose the right gun—a battered sniper rifle with a slight veer to the left and a partially crooked sight. It took forever to figure out the problems with the aim, but I loved that fucking gun from the moment I got my hands on it. Jericho wanted me to call it something, said I should give it a stupid girl's name like _Lucy_.

I just called him an idiot instead.

What started out as terrifying small time hunting—capping bloatflies and misting mole rats—soon turned into something bigger than I could possibly imagine.

I finally felt in control of my life, and it felt _good_.

My ego flourished alongside my confidence as my aim got better. Each trip we managed to find something worth a few more caps, and each return home made me that little bit cockier. Soon I swaggered through town like a goddamned Butch DeLoria wannabe. Jericho made fun of me for it all the time, but I stopped paying attention to anything he had to say.

Big fucking mistake.

We left town one evening heading west, towards an abandoned diner Jericho once holed up in with his gang. The only thing waiting for us there was a whole lot of piss all, and we headed back to Megaton bickering our asses off, each trying to blame the other for our shitty luck.

Suddenly he grabbed my arm, yanked me to the ground, and whispered for me to shut the fuck up and run. I figured he was just pulling my leg, all set to laugh his ass off at the naïve vaultie falling for another one of his little jokes and fleeing in terror from a bloatfly. Instead of listening, I shook him off and slithered forward to a pile of scrap metal masquerading as a wrecked car. Popping my head up, I saw what he planned on teasing me about.

Just another mutated animal wandering the wastes way out ahead of us. Sure, it was twice as tall as me, covered in leathery skin, and had a mouthful of fangs, but I was so goddamned sure of myself that if it didn't spit bullets, it didn't scare me. Despite Jericho's wild signals to get the fuck down, I lined up the shot, taking my time to draw a bead on the creature's head.

_Bang!_ The creature roared, rearing back and clawing at the air in pain. Jericho turned white and bolted, running back towards the empty diner. I adjusted the aim as cool as you please, not overly concerned with how fucking fast that thing moved other than to factor the speed of it in my next shot.

_Bang!_ The second shot slammed into it, barely making the creature pause. My heart didn't even skip a beat as I readied another round, so convinced Jericho was being an asshole again I didn't care that he was running like a burning man towards water. Instead I took my time, aiming right between the charging animal's eyes, waiting until it was a stone's throw away before squeezing the trigger.

_Bang!_ The bullet caught it in the eye just as it sprang, its dead body turning into a momentum laced meat bomb. It came down with a wet thump, slamming heavily against the hood of my cover before sliding off in a thick smear of blood.

"Nice try, jerk off!" Wild with victory, I leapt up from my spot and crowed at Jericho over his failed plan. "I _knew_ it was another of your goddamned jokes. I fucking knew it!"

He didn't find it very funny, walking back to me without a word despite my continual gloating. As soon as he reached me he snatched the rifle from my hands, tossed it to the side, then decked me in the side of the head. I hit the ground so hard I _bounced_.

"You don't know shit, kid." He didn't give me another look, just pulled out his knife and went to work chopping off the creature's hand.

"What the fuck was that for?" Head still ringing, I attacked him the only way I could—I wriggled like a wingless bloatfly over to him, kicking him in the ankle with my boots. He kept telling me to knock it off, and I kept cursing at him from the ground and kicking the shit out of his legs.

"When I tell you to do something, you fucking do it!" Furious with my constant disrespect and fed up with my attitude, he taught me a lesson the hard way. He took the bloody paw he'd cut off, grabbed hold of my leg, and stabbed one of the claws in my thigh. It went right through my leather pants like they weren't even there, plunging down through the skin, the muscles, the tendons, until the tip of it scraped against bone.

I shrieked, slapping a palm over the hot torrent of blood pouring from the wound before blubbering like a baby. It hurt so much even after he pulled the claw back out, a lingering sensation of a thousand white hot needles jammed into that missing slice of my thigh.

"I don't care if you were king shit of turd mountain down in the vault, but out here you're worth less than shit to me if you don't shut the fuck up and pay attention. I ain't gonna get my head cut off because you think you're too goddamned smart to _listen_. Christ!" He sliced off the second hand, slamming it down on the dust-covered hood beside the first. "And when I tell you to run from a fucking _deathclaw_, then you better fucking _run_."

"You radroach fucking prick!" Despite his very salient points, I wasn't quite ready to admit my failings. I was too busy being furious at him and sobbing over the pain. "Gimme a stim!"

"Nah. Not until I hear you say it." With a click of his lighter Jericho wandered over to a twisted piece of guardrail, still vigilantly dividing the wreckage of road from the rubble of houses. He sat down on it, just a dark shadow shape of smoke and the bobbing red tip of his cigarette.

"Fuck! Fine. I'm fucking _sorry_. I'll listen to your bullshit from now on. Just give me a fucking stim!" My less than heartfelt words satisfied him. I think it wasn't so much what I said, just so long as he heard me choking on my pride when I said it. He tossed over a stimpak, which I promptly tore open and jabbed into my leg. Immediately the pain lessened as the wound started to knit together, the relaxation loosening my tongue. "You're such an asshole!"

"Yeah, but I'm your kind of asshole," he called back without missing a beat. As I lay there on the ground, recovering from the stabbing and watching him suck on that cigarette like a babe on a tit, I realized he was absolutely right—right about that, right about everything. It was so fucking funny it hurt—this raider asshole had looked out for me and taught me more about survival than my own father ever had.

We kept on scavenging and shooting, spending our down time coming up with plans to score bigger and better than ever. Both of us wanted to rob Moriarty of his stash—Jericho knew where the bastard kept it, and I still hadn't found a lock I couldn't pick, but we couldn't figure a way to do it without winding up with the whole town hot on our heels. So we'd spend our time 'reconnoitering' the place, drinking our caps away while pretending to accomplish something.

During one of those covert missions a far bigger plan found us. The smell caught my attention first. I whipped my head around as soon as it tickled my nose, trying to find the source. I hadn't smelt anything like it since the vault, and back then I'd have sworn it didn't have any fragrance at all. But out in the wastes, there's nothing else like it—the unmistakable scent of _clean_ water.

It came from the corner, where a man dressed in a _matching_ suit—a rarity in itself—sat on a chair and watched the bar through shaded lenses. I walked right up to him, saying the first idiotic thing that came to mind. "You're not from around here."

_Hurr_. Abso-fucking-lutely brilliant, Seleste.

Thankfully he didn't dismiss me, instead looking at me with rapt fascination. "Neither are you," he finally pronounced in this chillingly calm voice, before inviting me to join him for a little talk.

When I sat down with Mr. Burke, I was nothing but a two-bit scavenging raider with grand dreams and no way to achieve them. When I stood up, I was a wasteland visionary with a mission, my every goal nothing more than a button press away.


	6. Chapter 6

Jericho never forgave me for the way I gave him the good news.

_It wasn't fucking funny_, he'd tell me over and over again. Each time he bitched me out, I'd laugh at him all over again. I wish I'd seen it—Jericho standing in the middle of Tenpenny Tower's courtyard, being watched by the security guards both on and off duty, flicking his lighter at the exact moment the bomb in Megaton detonated. The noise scared him so badly he threw his favourite lighter away with a yelp, his sudden movement prompting every guard to draw their guns on him while shouting at him to put his hands up and get down on the ground.

Instead I was dozens of stories above the wastes, up where the stink and grit couldn't reach, watching the explosion to the backdrop of whiskey toasts and murmured adulation. Maybe I should have felt bad about it, but I didn't then and I still don't—that town never did anything for me, and the only person from it worth giving half a shit about was down in the courtyard, having his life threatened by Tenpenny's highly strung security detail.

_Law of the wasteland, kid—kill, or die. Ain't no in between._

Those Megaton assholes might not've pushed the button on me, but they would've pulled the trigger, or simply watched me succumb to starvation and thirst. I'd seen it—hell, I'd lived it, wasting away on their streets, just another worthless junkie cheming her life away.

Besides, you could tell by looking at him that Mr. Burke was a man who got what he wanted, one way or another. Even if I'd said _no_, he'd have found somebody who'd say _yes_, and then I'd be the one waking up to the brightest fucking nightlight in the world.

Instead I was on top of the world, rewarded for my part in furthering the path of 'progress' with a penthouse suite, clean sheets, and pure water. Not just filtered water—this was the real deal, free of chemicals, radiation, or any other contamination. No longer did I have to swallow a monthly dose of Rad-x, to have my insides burned out as it stripped the radiation from my cells. I never acclimated to it, shitting dark blood for a week after every dose, but better that than suffer the horrors of rad poisoning.

Finally, I had a place to call home, the exact opposite of that hellhole of a vault I crawled out of. Up in my suite I had access to breezes and the night sky, freedom and luxury. I dreamed of Amata every day, spending my share of the caps we pried from the wastes on things I thought she'd like for _our_ place. I'd rattle around the walls of the suite, hiding from the sun and re-arranging knick knacks while Jericho sat out on the balcony, indulging in his favourite hobbies—drinking and stinking.

"Who the fuck is _she_?" he demanded one booze-saturated afternoon. "You keep going on about where _she_'d like the goddamned poster. What is she, your sister? She at least hot?" Chuckling to himself, he raised the bottle of whiskey to his lips. "Won't matter where you put it; 'cause when I'm done welcoming her, she won't be able to see straight."

"Don't even _think_ about it!" Blood boiling with fury at the idea of Jericho doing anything to my Amata, I didn't think—I just snatched a pistol from the table and pulled the trigger.

The bullet shattered the bottle, showering him in a torrent of booze and glass shards. "What the fuck?" He leapt out of his seat, trying to keep one eye on me as he shook the slivers off. "You're outta your mind! Christ!"

He stormed out of my place, disappearing into the wastes for almost a week. I apologized when he eventually came back, but I wasn't really sorry, because my little outburst worked.

He never breathed a word about Amata again.

Luck, fickle whore that she is, seemed to finally be winking my way for a change. At long last, I'd found a safe place to bring Amata when she got free—well, an _almost_ safe place.

Only one last obstacle stood in the way of our happiness, in the deadly combination of sweet tits, a nice ass, and an empty bobblehead of blonde hair. Susan Lancaster, Tenpenny Tower's resident working girl, took an immediate loathing to me. Not that her opinion was worth a radroach fart, but it greatly mattered whose ear she whispered it in—none other than the indomitable Mr. Burke.

She wanted me out, and I wanted her dead. Problem was, if I gunned her down in the quiet, clean corridors, I'd still wind up thrown out on my ass.

Life can be so unfair.

"Boo hoo. Cry me a fucking river, kid." Jericho, the wastes' most practical asshole, didn't have much in the way of sympathy for my troubles. Especially not when sucking back a smoke in a post-fuck stupor. "Just mix a bunch of shit together in a syringe and stick her with it."

"Yeah, sure. And when they ask who got her the chems, they won't suspect the ex-junkie on the top floor. You're a goddamn rocket scientist."

"Then make sure they can't find the body," he retorted, slapping my ass as he eased out of bed. "Jesus, there's more than one way to make a person vanish in the wastes."

"Really? Tell me about 'em."

Which is how I wound up forging a love letter, inviting Susan to a secret meeting with her powerful fuck buddy in the ruins of a greengrocer just south of the tower. Jericho added his own touch to it, bickering with me over the wording.

"Put in something about her being his little love bird. Women love that shit." He nodded at his own suggestion with the smug confidence of someone who doesn't have a goddamn clue.

"What? No we don't—I hate that sort of crap."

He just laughed at me, stealing the smoke dangling from my lips. "Fuck, kid, you ain't a woman. You only look like one."

I left the line in, and the dumb bitch lapped it up. Fucking Jericho.

The plan started simple enough. Wait for Susan to show up alone, carrying the note, then turn her into a radroach buffet with a shot to the head. We'd gone out the night before, making a show for the guards of heading to the west, avoiding any suspicion. Instead we looped around in a wide circle to get to the shop without being seen, where we waited out the night in between the empty shelves, swiping smokes from each other and going nuts with boredom.

"Shame to waste a pair of tits like that," Jericho muttered, in between rounds of his favourite game—_piss the vaultie off_. "You know how much those would go for at market?"

_Fucking Jericho!_ He waited until the last second before coming up with the perfect solution to my problem! If only we'd brought some _rope_...

We didn't end up needing it, Susan Lancaster turning surprisingly docile when faced with the choice of immediate death, or continued life somewhere far away. Besides, it was easier to march her through the wastes if she wasn't tripping over her bound feet with every other step.

"Let me handle this," Jericho muttered to me when we came into sight of Paradise Falls. At the first glimpse of the giant motherfuckers and their even bigger guns guarding the entrance, I suddenly lost the ability to use my tongue. He greeted the man at the gate like an old friend—turns out they really were old friends, once running together in the same gang years ago.

They bullshitted and laughed, negotiating the sale of Susan in between smokes and macho posturing. I chewed on my tongue and tried not to look too hard at anyone. No matter how badass I thought I was, with my rifle and my penthouse suite, as soon as I hit Paradise Falls I wasn't as important as the crap the runt of the slavers scraped off his shoe by comparison, and I knew it.

In one of those golden showers Luck enjoys pissing on my life, Susan fetched us way more than we figured. Surprised the hell out of us to learn she'd been through Paradise once before, and after an unapproved departure earned the ire of Eulogy Jones, leader of the slavers. He'd put a bounty on her, which we wound up collecting.

"What about her?" Jericho's buddy gestured at me. "There's always room in the pens."

"The kid? Nah," Jericho answered, unaware of the relief suddenly shooting through my veins. "You don't want her. She's just a crazy vaultie with bad aim."

"Holy shit." The other guard, who'd done nothing but flex his muscles and spit, suddenly goggled at me in awe. "It's Little Miss 101, the Vault Outlaw."

To call me surprised would be like saying nuclear armageddon was a wee bit toasty. After all, how could I know there was a bigmouthed asshole with a radio station talking all kinds of shit about me and the radioactive rubble that used to be Megaton?

Though that shock was nothing compared to the bomb the slavers dropped on me next; that same motormouthed DJ also liked to tell stories about the other escapee to crawl out of the vault—my _father_.

I'd never really considered looking for him before then. He'd run out of my life, and I'd put him out of my mind, but I always knew he was out there somewhere, as aware of him as a bad smell lingering in a small room. I didn't really care what happened to him, but since I had to pay a visit to this fuckwit of a DJ anyway, it couldn't hurt to ask after my dearest dad, right?

It hurt a hell of a lot just dragging our asses out to Three Dog. He broadcast from the downtown wastes, right in the middle of a super mutant clusterfuck. Fortunately we ran into a pack of uptight Brotherhood of Steel goons, who distracted the muties long enough to let us sneak by.

So I wasn't in a good mood when I finally arrived, ready to set the record straight. Three Dog wasn't too pleased to meet me either, until I mentioned my dad. As soon as I turned into '_James' kid_' he was all smiles and praise, happy to listen to every bullshit sob story I fed him along with every lie proclaiming my innocence of the Megaton matter.

Nobody can lie like a junkie.

We walked out of there with info I hadn't known I wanted, and we left behind a little present for Mr. Dog. A generous bouquet—of grenades, rigged up by Jericho in a rarely used cupboard while I was talking to the loudmouthed asshole.

GNR went off the air less than a week later, in a surprise explosion gossip eventually blamed on a super mutant attack.

The trail my father left was so wide a blind mole rat could make it out. Eventually we wound up back where we started—leaving Tenpenny Tower after stopping for supplies, heading out to the west. With the characteristic irrationality that marked my father's logic, he'd crawled out of one vault just to crawl right back into a different one.

I should've taken it as a sign nobody ever really changes.


	7. Chapter 7

"Jesus, you don't have to be a psycho bitch about it!" Jericho, sick of having a knife waved in his face, turned around and stalked back up the stairwell, heavy boots leaving a trail of dust and radroach guts behind.

It was too much to handle—being underground again, standing at a vault door, everything smothered in a false florescent glow, with Jericho mouthing off at my side. He wouldn't shut the fuck up, and only the very real threat of me carving out his tongue convinced him to go keep watch at the top entrance—a secret hatch in the oil-stained floor of a husk of an auto repair shop.

Vault 112 was all kinds of fucked up. Pristine pure and perfectly preserved, in this vault the machines roamed the halls while the handful of residents lay dormant in _tranquility loungers_. Damn—we should've let the machines sort it all out, rather than try to make the decisions ourselves. At least the world would still be _clean_.

I wandered through the empty rooms, a disorienting feeling of familiar strangeness making my skin crawl. I'd been here before—lived in it, suffered in it, lost my mind in it—except instead of decades worth of humanity staining the walls and rusting the gears, everything still sparkled with the factory polish.

It didn't take long to find my father, all roads leading to the tranquility lounge. Life sustaining pods with mind suppressing devices held everyone in stasis—those who'd placed their lives in the machine's tender care never let loose, reduced through decades of _lounging_ to withered strips of meat and square wave forms echoing in the vault's mainframe. Maybe the robots knew if they let the masters out again, they'd fuck the tidy rooms up with their simian-style two-fisted shit-flinging ways.

It took several sub-routines, a corrupt database, and an authority override before I managed to shut the merry-go-round off. Only one pod housed a human still within his lifespan, the hatch cracking open to reveal my father, coughing and spluttering as he tore tubes and electrodes from his body.

It took him a while to get his bearings, trusting his senses again for the first time in days. "Seleste?" he croaked, trying to make me out through mis-dilated, unfocused eyes. "It's good to see you, sweetie."

_Fuck_. All my waste-forged hardass defenses flaked off like paint in a dust storm. I broke down and cried like a baby, snotting all over him as we got him out of his virtual prison.

He babbled while I bawled, something about doctors and geckos and water, none of it mattering to me. I'd found my father, and I was under the quaint delusion he'd somehow make things better. After all, a dad is supposed to look out for his kid, right?

"But enough of that," he stated, feeling well enough to pry me off and hold me at arm's length for a good look. "What are _you_ doing out here? You were supposed to stay put. You could've had a good life in the Vault."

"_What?_" I jerked my arms away so fast I smashed an elbow into the side of the pod. Breathing became difficult, a heavy feeling I didn't want to acknowledge slamming into my stomach. "No, no I couldn't. It was killing me, and you knew it." The leaden emotions in my guts kindled with a sudden spurt of sticky fire. "You knew it, and you left me there. You abandoned me down there—"

"I didn't see it as abandoning you. I saw it as moving on, knowing you were safe." Oh, Christ, his denial was like all my bad memories rolled into one. The scientifically scrutinizing eyes, looking at me like a specimen rather than a person; the creep of command in his voice, annoyed at having his decisions questioned; and the slight twist of his shoulders, as if primed to duck out as soon he could, already set to forget this conversation ever happened because God knows it sure as fuck didn't matter to _him_.

"Cut the bullshit. I know you lied to me—about being born in the vault, about the outside world, about everything!" I had to find out my own history from _Three Dog_, learn my past from an asshole with a transmitter and a stack of lousy songs. That had fucking _stung_.

"I wanted a different life for you." He sighed, the same damn dismissive sigh he always used, the one he trotted out whenever _Seleste was being difficult again_. "It might mean you spent the rest of your life hating me, but... your well-being was worth that chance. I had hoped the Overseer would seal the Vault, making it impossible for you to leave."

My brain stopped when he said that. It shut down, turned the lights off, sent the workers home, and sold the machines. White hot fury and icy cold denial rampaged like heavily armed toddlers through my veins, without the watchful nanny of sanity to hold them in check.

"But I suppose it's too late to go back now, isn't it? The Overseer would likely have us shot on sight." Oblivious to my suffering, he just kept on talking, making things worse. "Well, then you'll just have to come with me to Rivet City. You've certainly proven yourself capable enough."

"No, wait...what? Rivet City? What the fuck does Rivet City have to do with this?" I couldn't process it, couldn't handle the mere idea of it, didn't want to admit the possibility of it—not even when the hard reality stood right in front of me, greatly annoyed by my filthy mouth.

"Coming all this way after me... I'd have thought you'd want to help with Project Purity." There—he tugged his lapels straight, prelude to another departure, yet another discussion cut short. "I have to keep going; I can't stop now."

"No." Desperate, deep in a deluded world of denial, I grabbed tightly onto his forearms to keep him from leaving. "You're going to stay here, and we're going to talk about—"

"There isn't time for this." With the reluctant patience of a self-appointed martyr, he tried to 'reason' with me. His work was so important, so close to being finished, a breakthrough so near...I'd heard the lines a thousand times before, excuses tossed at me to keep the tangled mess of my life out of his hair, flimsy trifles waved in front of my eyes to distract me from too many lonely nights of solitary dinners and silence.

"I'm going back to Rivet City." He'd made the decision long ago, the unexpected addition of his own _daughter_ changing nothing about the overall equation. It, did, however prompt him into his version of paternal charity—a laughably false lie. "It would be good to work with you, honey."

My anger overboiled, the claw of a hand yanking on his wrist suddenly flying off to slap him across the face. "Stop lying to me!" I shrieked at him, voice high-pitched and shrill. "If I ever mattered to you, your secret experiments wouldn't be secrets to _me_. You wouldn't have left me to rot in that hellhole. You wouldn't try to lock your _daughter_ away, try to bury me underground like a fucking corpse!"

He just rubbed his cheek and stared at me, eyes impassive as a stranger's as he watched his only child crumbling to pieces. "I'm afraid there's nothing else I can offer. When Project Purity is finished, we can sit down and really talk—"

"Talk? _Talk?!_ Why the fuck would you want to do that?" My heart exploded into a thousand jagged shards of shrapnel as I finally accepted what I'd known all along—I'd _never_ mattered to my father. All those years spent wanting his affection—hell, just his _attention_—nothing but wasted time and pointless emotions. I was nothing more to him than another checkmark on his to-do list. He'd checked that box by shoving me in the vault to wither and die, then I'd gone and fucked up his plans by getting out and saving his _life_.

Goddamn, how the irony _burned_.

"Keep your lies to yourself. I don't want to hear it anymore. I...I'm _done_." My heart had shattered in a supernova of emotion and feeling, leaving only an empty numbness in its place. I felt like a little meat-covered robot, with nothing but bloody circuits misfiring inside my cold, hollow shell. "I finally know who you are, and I don't want a damn thing to do with it."

"I'm sorry _you_ feel that way." He couldn't stop himself, getting in one last dig. It's probably the only honest thing he ever said to me—I'm sure he was sorry as hell I never felt, behaved, or fucking danced to his tune the way he wanted me to. In his eyes I was always the problem, with my emotions and questions and troubles, something he didn't know how to handle and something he didn't care enough about to learn how.

"You know what? Fuck you, _James_."

I left the man I'd once called father standing between the tranquility pods. I turned on my heel and stalked away with an odd sense of lightness washing over my skin. It didn't feel like loss—how can you lose what you never had?

It felt more like relief.

Whatever it was, Jericho jerked away so quickly at the sight of me striding up the stairs the cigarette fell from his lips. "Jesus, what the fuck happened to you? What'd you find down there?"

"Nothing that matters," I answered, walking straight out of that place with Jericho hot on my heels, mistrusting every word coming out of my mouth, but too savvy to call me on it. Only thing he later said about my return was _you still had that goddamn knife in your pocket_.

I entered that vault a confused child seeking answers, and emerged from it a determined woman who knew the answers made no difference. It didn't matter where I came from, or how I got there—out in the blank slate of humanity's greatest fuck up, you write your own story.

And I was damn well going to do just that, starting with another pilgrimage to Vault 101, and a brand new sign. It had no name on it, because it said everything I needed to say to both my bitterest enemy and my sweetest companion.

_I'm coming for you_.


	8. Chapter 8

People always like to claim they can change.

Don't listen to them, 'cause they're fucking liars. Nobody _ever_ changes.

I only wish I'd known that from the start. Things might have ended differently...

Everything sped up after I emerged from the second vault, time running bullet fast and twice as brutal. Walking out on _my_ terms, I felt powerful enough to destroy the moon if I wanted. But the only thing I really wanted—had _ever_ wanted—lay trapped underneath layers of lies, rocks, bullshit, and blastproof metal.

I could dig through the first three, but you can't shovel reinforced steel.

Jericho, never fond of waiting around, bitched constantly about my newfound obsession. Instead of raiding and drinking, all I wanted was to sit in front of that vault door and burn my way through. He'd get bored before I even got the blowtorch fired up, drifting outside to entertain himself by pissing his name on the ground. Eventually he stopped waiting and started wandering, spending more and more time hanging around his buddies in Paradise Falls. When he did come back, it'd be for a screw and a smoke, carrying with him rumours about some powerful soldiers supposedly setting up shop in the north.

For all the shit we'd been through, neither of us really cared when the knots binding us together began to unravel. It'd been fun while it lasted, but we weren't exactly sentimental over our arrangement. I still liked the asshole, and he never tried to sell me into slavery, so I'd say we considered each other friends when the whirlwind of our raiding days finally spun itself out.

Silence, once my loathed childhood tormentor, became my new friend. I worked for hours with nothing but the sparking hiss of melting steel to mark the passage of time. Each new journey to the Vault earned one small chunk less of door standing between me and my Amata. I would have _whittled_ that metal away even if it took the rest of my life, so long as it meant I could see her again.

It happened far sooner than that.

I arrived at the tunnel to the vault, having dragged another round of supplies back from Tenpenny Tower. Instead of the usual companionable silence, I heard someone whispering up ahead. Dropping everything, I readied my rifle and crept into the thick gloom of the rocky passage.

I didn't use a light, and the weak glow of the moon barely extended more than a few yards down. My feet stepped by blind familiarity, having spent so long in front of the door I could see it down to the last pebble whenever I closed my eyes. Halfway through, the voice grew loud enough to hear.

I recognized it.

"_Amata!_" I screamed out to her, hands suddenly clumsy with a half dozen oiled thumbs as I grabbed for, dropped, found, fumbled, then finally lit up my flashlight. I shone it all over the place, hearing echoes of her voice bouncing off the rocks, but finding nothing. I finally calmed down enough to realize I heard a recording, whispered in an urgent rush and slipped half-finished into the vault door PA to loop endlessly around my ears.

_They say you're out there. If you are, and you still remember me, we need your help. I changed the door password to my name and...damn! Nothing, father! No, I wasn't—_

I punched her name so hard into that console my knuckles ached. _Still remember me_...goddamn the Overseer! What had he told her, to make her even question that?

The first massive clang of the door shifting out of place almost made me piss myself in excitement. My hands shook like a junkie's readying another hit when I caught a glimpse of the vault entryway. It was just as I remembered it—which was all _wrong_. The red emergency lights still flickered, and a thick haze hung in the acrid air. It stung to breathe, a noxious concoction of oxygen and recycled smoke.

I marched in there, holding up my all access pass, fully prepared to take back what was mine. No guards ran in, nobody there to see my triumphant return decked out as a walking _bomb_.

No way would I let the Overseer kill me easily. All the explosives I'd brought, intending to jam into the holes I'd burnt in the steel door, lay strapped tightly to me in a parody of armour. In my hand I waved around a primed grenade.

If I went down, the ceiling would go with me.

I stepped loudly through the long hallway to the atrium, abandoning surprise in favour of explosive might. Instead of residents milling about in their pointless daily routines, I found nothing but a security officer standing sentry behind a makeshift barricade.

"Seleste?" Officer Gomez, lifting up his visor to reveal a face aged rapidly with stress, called out to me. "Is that you—_holy shit!_"

He damn near ran off at the sight of my grenade. I shouted him back, demanding he take me to Amata, threat of detonation convincing him to listen.

The trek through the vault revealed it to be even more fucked up than I'd last seen. Barricades and broken furniture littered the rooms, with dark unsavoury stains spattered over everything. Officer Gomez nervously filled me in on the news.

The amount of crazy in the vault reached critical mass the night my father got out, and hadn't gone down since. The fragile vault equipment the Overseer turned off, still in use decades past its best before dates, didn't want to come back online, while the other systems—like the air purifier—struggled and choked on the increased burden. The vault lifestyle, always flawed and broken underneath, had finally shattered, its rotten insides plain for all to see.

The residents turned on each other rather than try to fix it, fighting over the issue of opening the door. I beamed with pride when I learned Amata argued the loudest of all those in favour of getting _out_.

"The rebels are holed up in the medical labs. I can't take you any closer than this. Besides, I think you know the way." Officer Gomez managed a weak smile at me, eyes fixated on the grenade my thin fingers clutched together as he edged away.

The casual walk down the hallway turned into a trot, then a full out run. "_Amata!_" I bellowed for her as I worked the pin back into the grenade, afraid I'd lose control and blow the both of us up at first sight. Exhausted 'rebels' turned their bitter faces towards me as I bolted by, their eyes bugging out at the ghost of vaulties past.

They were nothing but shades to me, inconsequential faded memories compared to the brilliant beacon of hope poking her head out of the lab. "You came back—_oof!_" I grabbed Amata, clutching her in a remorseless embrace as momentum and balance tilted us about, two crazy dancers spinning in the hallway to the strains of the reunion waltz.

She took the lead, guiding us to my father's old office for a private chat. I fucking _trembled_ those first few moments, petting her and laughing wildly and leaking tears the entire time. She'd grown leaner, _stronger_, in our time apart, her experience with command and faint brush with conflict bringing out that spark of life of hers I loved the most.

I was so goddamn proud of her, I could've _burst_.

I almost did, my tongue clicking off faster than a Geiger counter in the ruins of Megaton. My torrent of words collided in a junk heap of half-finished ideas—telling her to pack, about _our_ place waiting out in the wastes, trying to explain how damn much I missed her, and how good she looked.

"No, Seleste, no. Stop." Amata pushed me into a chair, her hands holding my mouth shut. "_Listen_ to me."

I did, my happy shivers turning into shakes of _fury_. Her father—that fucking egotistical maniac—still managed to screw up my life, despite the fact he couldn't even hold his vault together. Mr. Brotch, escaping detention in the security cells, brought back the plans of some renegade security goons. They intended to end the rebel threat—permanently.

And the Overseer, smug on his throne with his multi-lensed eyes, didn't know a damn thing about it.

At least, that's what Amata swore, despite the fact I didn't believe it for a second. "He's behind it," I told her, trying my best not to shout the truth. "Have you forgotten what he did to you? What he made _you_ do?"

"No. That was...that was an accident. I never meant to..." Amata crumpled, eyes overbrimming with bad memories. I hugged her to me, hating her father more with every hot tear spattering on my shirt—every single one of them his fucking fault. "He's not like that," she sobbed to me, still refusing to see reason. "I just need to see him, talk to him, but the guards..."

Delicate fingertips traced over the powder keg strapped to my chest, Amata's sniffles slowing to a halt. "Wait...how did you get past the guards?"

I didn't want to do it. I _hated_ it—the idea, the danger, the ways it could get really fucking ugly really fucking fast. But when Amata turned those wet eyes on me, begging me to do this one last thing _for her_, how could I possibly say no?

We moved through the vault like a mutated brahmin made out of friendship and decorated in nitroglycerin. I clutched that grenade so tightly I worried I'd detonate the damn thing by crushing it, while Amata held onto my other hand so hard I swore I felt my joints snap. The air stank with crazy, every breath reminding me of the worst of my paranoia and claustrophobia, raising the hairs on the back of my neck as the old familiar feeling of thousands of watching eyes settled onto my skin.

One pair of eyes had been watching, the Overseer waiting for us in the empty atrium, an escort of his toughest thugs at his side. It was my turn to squeeze Amata's hand so hard she whimpered. No way would I let her out of my grasp, grenade or no. She was my talisman, my prize, my reward and my reason all bundled in one beautiful girl. She was literally the only fucking thing left I had worth living for, and the only reason I bothered staying alive.

The Overseer didn't even bother talking to me, just shooting me with a hate-filled laser beam of a glare. I matched it right back, flicking the tab of the grenade with my thumb to spell it out for him—he would _not_ win this time. He looked away to Amata, beads of sweat dotting his brow as he realized what he was dealing with.

She lay it out for him as I kept watch, shocked by the size of her courage. Amata spoke loud and proud, pointing out his failings as an Overseer, the dissension within his own security force, the dwindling, inbred future awaiting the residents unless the door finally opened.

"Damnit, I told them I won't let this degenerate into violence again! The Vault simply can't take the instability anymore," he finally croaked, all crocodile tears and bullshit. "Perhaps...perhaps the vault does need new leadership." Oh, he pretended to be weak, lulling his daughter with another thick smear of manipulative lies. I know, because his eyes flickered to me for one brief, telling instant, right before he set off an entirely different sort of chain reaction. "Amata, I hereby appoint you the new Overseer, effective immediately."

I almost dropped the fucking grenade.

I distinctly remember it, the sick slick feeling of it slipping from my sweaty palm. I recall the stomach drop of fear when gravity tugged at it, trying to pull it free. I can still hear Amata's terrified scream when I let go of her, yanking my other hand up to slam it back into place.

As for what happened next, the memories...

They only come to me in silent dreams, waiting for closed eyes and darkness to creep out, flickering flashes of things I don't want to remember and don't want to believe.

Amata, mouth moving too fast and head shaking too hard, shrinking back in the half shadowed darkness of the maintenance room, the whirling lights of the generators spinning blood-red light over the knife in my hands...

Green text on a black background, the plain language of the console confirming _alarm__ systems offline, water systems offline, camera systems offline_, while a blinking cursor awaited an answer to _disable air purifier, Y/N?..._

The vault controls on the outside, dark red smears discolouring three of the keys—_A, M, T_—coal black smoke billowing out from cracks between the cog shaped door as it shudders shut one final time...

Flakes—lying in the middle of the parched wasteland, ground so dry it looks flaked like giant scales. Lying under the searing sun, my skin charring into burnt flakes. Watching dull red flakes fall from my hands, the gritty winds stealing away dried blood that was _not my own_...

And at the end of the nightmares, just when it seems it couldn't hurt any worse, the barbed whispers of echoes begin. _Just because you hate your father, doesn't mean I feel the same...It's not just him who needs me, they all need me...Don't you get it? I don't want to abandon the Vault. I only wanted to open it...I'm sorry, but _no_...Don't be gross—that wasn't for _real_..._

Each time I awake with the same horrid shock I received as I lay in the molten deserts of the wastes, memory charring into flakes of ash, covered in the blood of the only thing that ever mattered. A flash of nuclear bright light blinds my eyes, ears ringing with the sickening high pitch of her pained screams.

The only difference is the first time that happened, my ears cleared to hear a warm southern accent ordering someone to _prepare her for transport immediately_.


	9. Chapter 9

"My father? Fuck you, James."

I mouthed off at the blurry man looming over me. My body floated in a wash of unfamiliar chems, while my mind drifted somewhere far away. All I knew is I didn't care, and it didn't really matter anymore if I cared or not.

Nothing to care for, nobody to care about...

"An addict." The southern voice barked its orders, commands I couldn't understand and didn't plan on obeying. "Get her off the truth serum, then get her clean. We'll do this the old fashioned way."

His way led to the naked harshness of reality, with its unflinching lighting and stark clarity of sensations. I awoke in a shockingly clean room, appearing as new and tidy as the ones from Vault 112. Had the machines finally had enough, and taken the world from our grubby, destructive hands?

Good for them.

A door slid open in a hiss of perfectly functioning hydraulics. New shoes, making stiff, staccato noises on the floor, carried a man with white hair and hunter's eyes over to stand beside my gurney. I lay strapped down, an itch blossoming between my shoulder blades, utterly devoid of fear.

I had nothing left to lose.

"So, you're awake. Let's keep this nice and simple. You're going to tell me the code for that Purifier, and you're going to tell me now."

I stared up at him, sighing at the futility of it all. Even when he levelled the laser pistol at my temple I didn't flinch—I just waited for him to pull the trigger. "Do it," I urged, voice cracked from ages in the parched wastes. "You've got the wrong person, so stop wasting both our time and get it over with."

He stared down at me, weighing me for some hidden attribute, some value I couldn't fathom. "I don't think so," he finally said, holstering his pistol under his long leather coat. "At least, not according to your DNA. You're the daughter of one Doctor James—"

"My _father?!_" I spat out the word in a feral rage. The gurney rattled and bounced as I struggled against my bonds, snarling and spitting out my venomous hatred. "This is my fucking _father's_ fault? I'll kill him. Let me out so I can kill that cocksucking bastard. That motherfucker!"

"I'd let you do that," the man calmly replied, "but he's already dead."

The fight went out of me along with most of my breath. _Dead?_ I couldn't believe it—I'd planned on being the one to do it.

After all, the man who'd given me life had also systematically destroyed it. Shoving me into a vault, then causing me to flee from it—and the only person I ever loved—under the worst of circumstances, leaving such ill will behind that even when I did go back, they couldn't...she wouldn't...I _shouldn't_ have...

And it was all his fucking fault.

"How?" I breathed, feeling my heart racing under my skin despite my fervent desire it _stop_ beating. "Was it at least painful?"

Colonel Autumn—as he introduced himself, as I was to call him—explained his unusual form of hospitality to me. He was the second in command of the Enclave—right under the goddamn President of the good ol' U.S. of fuckin' A.

Turns out my father didn't want to listen to the _President_ any more than he listened to me. He'd gone back to Rivet City and his little water project, screwing around with his experiments in a scientific circle jerk of grand ideas and ego. When the Enclave came knocking, he refused to share his genius.

"He died, rather than let you destroy it?" I had trouble believing it—that seemed almost _human_ of him. "Why do you need a code? With the firepower you guys are packing, can't you just blow it up?"

"No," Colonel Autumn answered, with the closest I've ever heard to a chuckle out of that man. "We don't want to destroy it. We want to turn it _on_."

Ah—now that made _perfect_ sense. Rather than share the glory, my father killed himself to spite them all. Selfish megalomaniac prick.

"I assume there's some form of trap," I said, earning a nod from Autumn. "And there's no way to hack into the programming, or you wouldn't need me." Again, another approving nod. "So you tracked down his daughter, hoping she could provide the answer."

Another affirmative, malevolent nod.

I considered it for a long moment, Autumn patiently waiting with the lethal grace of a deathclaw. I could tell him no, get him to end my miserable fucking existence in a matter of seconds. It would be the easy solution to all my problems—simply stop living.

"I'll do it," I announced, surprising him and, to a lesser extent, myself. Revenge, it seems, proved a dish too irresistible to refuse, even if it was served on the wrong side of the grave. "James died to keep you from getting it. So I'm going to do everything in my power to give it to you."

"And in return?" Colonel Autumn scrutinized me, waiting for the other shoe to drop. "What do you want?"

"_Nothing_." I turned my head to the far wall, trying not to let him see the bitter moisture stinging my eyes. "There's nothing you could offer, because there's nothing that I want."

Perhaps it was a bit of a one-sided deal, but Colonel Autumn didn't hesitate to accept. Only after they unstrapped me did I tell him the full truth—my father was so secretive he wouldn't say shit if you fed him a turd sandwich. But if anyone had a chance of guessing the right combination, it would be me.

After all, everyone who'd known him better was already dead, thanks to his selfish actions.

As I suspected, Autumn didn't have me shot when I told him. They wouldn't have spent so much time and so many resources tracking me down if they had a better option lined up, short of systematically electrocuting a thousand soldiers testing each possible code one at a time.

That, Autumn explained to me, would be my lie-detector test. If I put in the wrong code, I'd die. But if I put in the right one...

I didn't care if I got it right, so numb inside I figured the emotional part of my mind had somehow broken. Rattling around in my staggeringly tidy cell, wracking my brains to come up with what had mattered most to my father—besides himself—I paid little attention to the camera mounted in the wall. All my life I'd been watched, and as a tolerated prisoner I expected nothing less.

However, I didn't expect the watcher on the other end to invite me for a motivational pep talk. President Eden himself wanted me to come for a visit, a meeting Colonel Autumn only begrudgingly allowed.

As soon as I ascended the dozens of stairs and came face to _face_ with Eden, I understood exactly why he'd balked. The machines _were_ in control, and they wanted me to help clean up the world.

From clean water to clean genetics...Eden asked a little favour, wanting me to take the scouring brush of modified FEV to the mutations of the wasteland. Just a little dose in the water supply, and the virus would do the rest, making short work of any and all aberrations out there—deathclaw to ghoul, super mutant to wastelander, it didn't discriminate.

After all, I'd already _cleansed_ Megaton in the name of progress. Why would I balk at pressing the reset button on humanity's greatest fuck up?

I returned to my cell with the vial hidden in my clothes, and a tiny seed of an idea planted in the back of my mind. If Eden didn't trust Autumn—the Colonel devoutly loyal and above suspicion, from what I could tell—then how much longer before those logical circuits deduced that _all_ of humanity should be cleansed?

The idea kept me awake that night, the stressful friends of isolation and paranoia creeping in for a slumber-free party. Throw in a watching camera lens, and the very real possibility I'd never escape, and suddenly it felt like my childhood all over again. Funny how the end of my days should mirror the beginning—filled with oppression and lies, courtesy of my dearest _father_. He was the architect of my misery, the alpha and omega of my pain—

"Fuck!" Scrambling out of bed, I slammed my hand on the intercom switch. "A bible! Get me a bible, _now_!"

Colonel Autumn, appearing as composed and controlled in the middle of the night as he did in the middle of the day, found me a jittering mass of excitement, fully dressed and raring to go. He didn't have to ask, as one look at me told him all he needed to know. Each curt command of his spawned a thousand complied reactions. Within minutes we were on board a vertibird, lifting off in the pre-dawn gloom, ready to change the world.

Colonel Autumn eased himself into the seat beside me mid-flight, dropping without preamble into a dangerous question. "You took the vial?"

What was I going to do, lie? I nodded at him, keeping my mouth shut as my stomach did back-flips. Flight, something I'd never consciously experienced before, didn't particularly agree with me.

"Then he no longer trusts me."

There wasn't anything I could say to that, and Autumn didn't feel the need to say anything else. We rode in silence the rest of the way.

The vertibird touched down at the Jefferson Memorial, site of my father's pet project. The building glowed in the dawn light, while the radiation tainted waters of the river sparkled like liquid gold. It appeared serene and peaceful, though I felt anything but.

I'd suddenly realized I wasn't yet ready to die.

Walking in through the narrow, age darkened halls, I tried not to let doubts shake my confidence. Surely I'd chosen the right answer, the only grouping of numbers that made any possible sense—the chapter and verse of the bible passage he'd hung in our quarters, sole decoration in a desolate existence. He'd based his entire project around those lines, and if nothing else, using it as his control code would have appealed to his swollen vanity.

Colonel Autumn took the vial from me when we reached the control room, slipping it directly into the filtration system. Mouth a shade more grim, he motioned for me to punch in the code.

The Colonel and the soldiers stood on the other side of reinforced glass, watching me with an air of anticipated failure. For a brief moment I hesitated, wondering how far I could run until a plasma rifle cut me down, before I realized there wasn't anything left for me to run _to_.

"Fuck you, James." Whispering out the curse—fitting if they were my last words or my declaration of revenge—I jabbed my fingers onto the keys. Three little digits later, I slammed the green button to engage, and awaited my turn on the wheel of fate.

Luck, the bitch goddess of my life, chose to smile.

The machines roared into action, vibrating so hard they rattled my teeth. Enclave scientists flooded into the room, tearing ass to get to their assigned stations and monitor the equipment. Colonel Autumn offered a shadow of a smile, before signalling me to walk with him back outside.

We stood on the empty helipad, watching the waters of the basin change colour as Purity worked its scientific magic. "How long has Eden been President?" I asked him.

"Too long." He shielded his eyes against the light reflecting off the water.

"And nobody else has met him?"

"No." He lowered his hand and turned to face me, wearing the wary expression of a man too aware of his own mortality. "Why?"

"So his seclusion could, hypothetically, be due to a lengthy illness." I danced around the implication at first, all too aware of the meaning of _treason_ and the fact I stood next to the second in command. But damn it, I couldn't help myself—the machine had let me out of my cage, and I was already thinking of ways to smear shit on the walls.

When Autumn didn't immediately shoot me, I continued on. "So if he were to succumb suddenly, the next in line would become interim President, right? At least, until an election could be called, and I imagine this," I waved behind me, towards the wastes and ruins of a failed society, "would keep the Enclave too busy to bother with one of those for a very long time."

"It's not—"

I didn't let him speak. Hell, I didn't let the poor man _think_. I just laid it out for him—what I'd seen in Vault 112, what I'd heard from Eden, what dark imaginings lay in store for us should we surrender to the machine. "He's only as good as he is because _people_ made him that way. And if you look around, you'll see we can't be trusted not to fuck a good thing up. Sooner or later the humanity hiding inside him will come out, and it won't be pretty."

"Paranoid sumbitch, aren't you?" Autumn didn't say anything else for a long while, just turned back to the river and watched the water. I stood beside him and patted my near empty pockets, wishing I had a smoke. I couldn't find one of those, but I did have some reading material to pass the time—the little bible I used for research. I flipped the pages randomly, skimming it with disinterest, until a certain passage in Exodus caught my eye, as it ended with _punishing children and grandchildren to the third and fourth generation for their fathers' wickedness_.

"I know what I want," I told Autumn, pulling his attention away from the water. "For my reward, I want your doctors to sterilize me."

He hadn't expected that request, but took it in stride. I certainly hadn't expected to make it, but as soon as I saw the line I understood what had started with my father could end with me.

He may have been Alpha, but I would be Omega.

The rhythmic whump of the vertibird's rotors finally broke the quiet. Colonel Autumn spun around to watch it land. "I know the override codes for Eden," he suddenly declared. "But I'll require assistance."

"Aye, Colonel." I attempted a salute—first and last time I ever tried that mess of a motion—before following him to the vertibird. We strapped ourselves in side by side, both of us fully committed to tearing down the very machine that had raised us up.

The end of the world had come and gone, and with the activation of Purity and the inclusion of the FEV we'd written the last chapter of its twisted tale. It was time for humanity to stage a comeback, and I suddenly found myself with a new purpose in life, thrust into the role of lieutenant to its Colonel.

The beginning of my life had finally ended, which despite its ups and downs no longer mattered. Only the future lay before me, and the glittering promise of a new age and a new beginning—for myself, for the Enclave, and for the _world_.

But that is a tale for _later_...


End file.
